Monasteries

Some residents apparently are not satisfied by reassurances from members of the Myanmar Buddhist Society that a meditation center and monastery proposed for their community would be a place of quiet. A community group says it will appeal a Planning Commission decision giving the group permission to build the 5-acre retreat. "It is all those cars coming and going that concern me," said Georgia Campbell, who lives on the hilltop above the site.

MAALOULA, Syria - From the debris-strewn front garden of the Safir Hotel, Syrian military commanders barked orders to troops taking cover in the smoke-shrouded maze of streets below. "If you hear any movement, throw hand grenades immediately!" a general advised on his two-way radio as he peered at the battle unfolding like a distant video game at the bottom of the hill. On Tuesday, Syrian forces were targeting the remnants of a rebel force in this historic town, long a center of Christian worship and pilgrimage.

The main part of Thyangboche Monastery, a landmark for foreigners hiking to Mt. Everest, has burned to the ground, a Buddhist priest said Saturday. The priest, who flew by helicopter to the site high in the Himalayas, told reporters the ruins of the main prayer hall were still smoldering. The fire, apparently caused by an electrical fault, broke out late Thursday. Hikers camping at the monastery helped save some of the religious books and paintings.

The Getty Museum has announced that it is voluntarily returning a 12th-century Byzantine illuminated New Testament to a monastery in Greece after learning that the item had been illegally removed from the Monastery of Dionysiou more than 50 years ago. Officials at the Getty said in a release on Monday that the museum acquired the manuscript in 1983 as part of a "large, well-documented" collection. The manuscript is currently at the Getty Center...

Russia is bringing home from the United States 18 sacred Moscow monastery bells that had been sold as scrap by the Soviet Union. Charles Crane, a U.S. industrialist and diplomat, bought the Danilovsky Monastery's bells from Josef Stalin's atheist government in 1930 and gave them to Harvard University. Many similar bells from churches were melted down in Stalin's industrialization drive. President Vladimir V.

May 14, 1989 | PETER AIKEN, Aiken is a free-lance writer living in Nantucket, Mass. and

Monasteries, regardless of religion, appeal to that side of my personality that is contemplative, bookish and escapist. I arrange for a room, choose worthy paperback roommates, load a camera and journey toward the silence. I remember past monasteries: a rainy night's climb to the Buddhist monastery on Adam's Peak on Sri Lanka; the dusty ride to St. Catherine's in the Sinai, the shattering of thin ice to wash my morning face at the Japanese monastery on Mt. Koya, Honshu Island. The years passed and I found myself in Thessaloniki, shortened to Salonika, applying for permission from the Ministry of Northern Greece to go to Mt. Athos on the Chalcidice Peninsula below the plains of Macedonia.

More than 200 people jammed Tuesday night's City Council meeting to express their views on a proposal for a Buddhist monastery and meditation center on the east side of town. Those against construction of the religious complex, proposed by the Myanmar Buddhist Society of America, told council members they feared it would bring traffic jams and noise. Those who spoke in support of it included representatives of a number of other religious organizations.

May 31, 1988 | MICHAEL PARKS and JAMES GERSTENZANG, Times Staff Writers

As bells pealed and monks sang, President Reagan paid an unlikely visit Monday, turning a 700-year-old Russian Orthodox monastery into the very symbol of his personal campaign to pressure the Soviet Union into allowing greater freedom of religion. Reagan brought an entourage of some of the most senior officials of the U.S. government, along with television cameras and reporters, to the Danilov Monastery.

Government troops raided one of several monasteries they are surrounding in the central city of Mandalay and detained some of those inside, state radio reported in Myanmar, formerly Burma. Monks, who have been at the forefront of anti-government protests, had been refusing to minister to soldiers. Earlier reports said the monks had given up their boycott after troops ringed at least six monasteries.

It's an intriguing picture: The 21 Buddhist monks who make up the Dalai Lama's personal choir riding in a van to between concerts of chants, swaying gently to the music of Otis Redding and the Supremes. "I was playing Otis," said Mickey Hart, drummer/percussionist for the Grateful Dead and self-styled ethnomusicologist. "And they liked it. I mean, they're not screaming out the window when they hear Otis; they smile and they move back and forth. They're very light, fun-loving people."

Alexander the Great slept here -- and lived here too. The place is Macedonia, which was part of Greece in ancient times. Most recently, it has been working to raise its tourism profile after its break from the former Yugoslavia more than two decades ago. Tour company Macedonia Experience, based in the city of Skopje, is part of the effort to put the nation on the European tourism map. It offers many active and leisure trips around the country,...

HELWAN, Egypt - The gunmen sped past on motorcycles and in a car, firing automatic weapons and hurling gasoline bombs. Parishioners ran for cover as bullets chipped the stone and rattled the metal doors of St. George's Church. Adel Samir hasn't slept since Friday's attack. A mechanic, he now guards the church south of Cairo. The street out front has been barricaded. Other men, tattooed with the cross, wield clubs and patrol the perimeter amid yellow dust rising from cement factories along the Nile.

The extraordinary abortion-themed drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" placed Cristian Mungiu in the forefront of international cinema, and the Romanian director's new film, "Beyond the Hills," likewise concerns the bond between two young women. Again they face ineffectual institutions, but there's another, more urgent push-pull at the heart of this haunting, beautifully acted feature. After several years apart, lifelong friends Alina (Cristina Flutur) and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan)

TERYAYEVO, Russia - As she tried to remove the priceless Bible from its glass case, Moscow University professor Irina Pozdeyeva could barely lift the almost 2,000-page book. The gray-haired scholar ran her fingers through the meticulously stitched and restored leaves of the Bible, produced in 1581 by Ivan Fyodorov, father of Russian printing. Pozdeyeva said she never fails to experience a surge of emotion when she handles the book, one of 350 surviving copies of the first Bibles printed in Russia in the old Slavonic language.

Birds twitter and sunshine twinkles through groves of bamboo and banyan trees adorned with cascades of orchids. With every step, my Vibram boot soles crush hibiscus blossoms littering a pathway, while butterflies flutter around a group of elderly folks welcoming the morning with the gracious silent semaphore of tai chi. At a clearing where remnants of a World War ll gun emplacement rust, half-swallowed in greenery, an opening in the jungle reveals...

Born more than 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Lucretius really belongs to our day. How's that? Well, when you look closely at his great work, "On the Nature of Things" (W.W. Norton: 177 pp., $15.95 paper), you find him writing about a world that sounds much like our own. There he speaks of tiny, indivisible bits called atoms ("all/are sundered into particles of matter") and something that even sounds like a description of DNA ("each thing has but one substance/marked and designed to bring it into being")

Firefighters refused to respond to medical emergencies at the monastery, garbage men wouldn't pick up its trash and a county health worker described its tiny patients as "little rattlesnakes." The reason: Starcross Monastic Community, a Roman Catholic monastery run by lay workers, wanted to provide a home for infants with AIDS. Yet through it all, much of the bad was offset, Tolbert McCarroll said.

When clanging streetcars, blaring horns, hissing trains and other noises of the city get to be too much for Munichers, there's always St. Boniface's. The Roman Catholic monastery, an island of tranquility in downtown Munich, rents out prayer cells for those in dire need of peace and quiet. "Recently a Protestant minister came on what we call our quiet day, which is usually one Saturday a month," said Abbot Odilo Lechner, who heads the Benedictine monastery.

Occasionally they would knock on a neighbor's door to borrow tools or ask for help with a maintenance issue. But for the most part, the Buddhist nuns on Marcon Drive in Walnut kept to the ranch-style house where they lived and worshiped. For 10 years, the young women with the shaved heads and long robes were accepted as part of an eclectic neighborhood of single-family homes, a middle school, a spacious public park and four churches — one Mormon, one Lutheran and two catering to Korean American Christians.

The ruins poke out of a monotonous stretch of scrub and beckon the world to visit Afghanistan as it was more than 1,400 years ago, when Buddhist monasteries dotted the landscape. An ancient citadel juts from a tall crag, standing sentinel over what once was a flourishing settlement. The monastery sits largely preserved, as does a series of reliquaries adorned with schist arches and shelves. But few people today will have a chance to see these ruins, which French and Afghan archaeologists are unearthing.